AI Email Thread Abstraction and Summarization

A daunting, and highly public email has landed in your lap..top to respond. The email thread goes between over a dozen people all across the globe. All of the people on the TO list, and some on the CC list, have expressed their points about … something. There are junior technical and very senior business staff on the email. I’ll need to understand the email thread content from the perspective of each person that replied to the thread. That may involve sifting through each of the emails on the thread. Even though the people on the emails are English fluent, their response styles may be different based on culture, or seniority of staff (e.g. abstractly written). Also, the technical folks might want to keep the conversation of the email granular and succinct.

Let’s throw a bit of [AI] automation at this problem.

Another step in our AI personal assistant evolution, email thread aggregation and summarization utilizing cognitive APIs | tools such as what IBM Watson has implemented with their Language APIs. Based on the documentation provided by their APIs, the above challenges can be resolved for the reader. A suggestion to an IBM partner for the Watson Cognitive cloud, build an ’email plugin’ if the email product exposes their solution to customization.

A plugin built on top of an email application, flexible enough to allow customization, may be a candidate for Email Thread aggregation and summarization. Email clients may include IBM Notes, Gmail, (Apple) Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, and OpenText FirstClass.

Add this capability to the job description of AI assistants, such as Cortana, Echo, Siri, and Google Now. In fact, this plug-in may not need the connectivity and usage of an AI assistant, just the email plug-in interacting with a suite of cognitive cloud API calls.

AI Document Abstraction and Summarization

A plug in may also be created for word processors such as Microsoft Word. Once activated within a document, a summary page may be created and prefixed to the existing document. There are several use cases, such as a synopsis of the document.

With minimal effort from human input, marking up the content, we would still be able to derive the contextual metadata, and leverage it to create new sentences, paragraphs of sentences.

Update:

I’ve not seen an AI Outlook integration in the list of MS Outlook Add-ins that would bring this functionality to users.

Amazon leverages its existing shipping and logistics knowledge and applies it to a new cloud resource, a 3D Printer.

Using Amazon’s platform, a user can connect through Amazon’s cloud services, lock a shared cloud resource, a 3D printer, feed the printer one of several formats: 3D blueprint, 3D digital scan, or industry spec file format. The object is then printed out, and shipped using Amazon’s shipping logistics engine.

Make the object you want and Amazon will ship it to you. How much does it cost? Cost of materials used to produce the object is quantified and charged, in addition to a cloud [resource] usage fee, and potentially discounted shipping based on Amazon’s current scale.

As the service is matured, design tools, basic and advanced, will be provided to produce your designed object. Only your imagination, and capability to express it limits your ability along with Amazon to deliver your products.

At some point, a seller can have a storefront, where objects can not only be shipped, but build on demand as well. For example, circuit boards can be sold now, with the above engine and service, from a seller with the proper schematics.

WORM Storage, or Write Once Read Many, is ideal for archiving data, such as electronic communications. I was just wondering out of the big, commodity cloud storage vendors, such as Amazon (S3), Windows, or Google, for example, what their offerings would be included but not limited to physical media retrieval upon request, such legal requests, or the client requests a backup of the storage.

I was reading the article, As Big Investors Emerge, Bitcoin Gets Ready for Its Close-Up, and am amazed how far people are taking Bitcoin as a real currency. I read in the article that there are investors paying substantial real money to acquire Bitcoins. The article states they hope retail places like Starbuck or Amazon may accept this currency.

When I go to Marketwatch.com and compare the currency exchange rates, GBP: USD, for example, I’d like to see this currency listed so I understand the actual value, the futures of this ‘foreign’ currency. There are many economic questions regarding the creation of a currency, and the belief in that currency. Look at Greece and the Euro, the Peso, the Loonie, speaking of, it seems that there may be a market for bitcoins, but not in the traditional sense that ‘physical’ goods are currently exchanged.

Bitcoins will be traded for the use of cloud resources and services, such as computation cycles, and other cloud applications and resources. If Grid Computing, where users allow the utilization of their computation resources as I suggest in my Post Grid and Cloud Computing Going Head to Head: Profit for You, then both Cloud and Grid computing can trade in Bitcoins,and what they buy is cloud resource utilization. An exchange may exist so people can trade, and the value of these coins may have value, allowing for the ‘tangible’ purchase of computation resource, which may actually mean something.

This approach gets muddied when you are able to apply cloud printing resources which print 3D ‘physical’ goods. I would have to see major cloud players, such as Amazon to allow for the acceptance of these coins.

For starters, I can see, if you acquire an Amazon Visa or Mastercard, instead of the points system where the cardholder gets reward points, they can be allocated Bitcoins. Amazon would have to acquire real Bitcoins, and an exchange would have to be established, so if Amazon’s clients are distributed Bitcoins, they are given the proper allocation, e.g. 1 USD to N Bitcoins. Anyway, Starbucks coffee for thought.

Here are a few other ideas for Bitcoin Applications:

Atlantic City, Las Vegas, or Other Physical Casino slot machines that accept and pay out in Bitcoins

On line gaming, such as on line poker or slots, that accept and pay out Bitcoins

Affinity Card programs that pay out in Bitcoins, according to their own standard, anything from On line stores like Amazon, to Computer Electronics Brick and Mortar stores to Credit Cards

PayPal, or other intermediary transaction firms that allow their customers to send and receive Bitcoins as payment. The transaction intermediary firm may have an independent account for Bitcoins specifically, exclusive from other currencies.

I was thinking about what was around before cloud computing. I thought about mainframes and allocated computing cycles, then I thought about the SETI @ Home project with it’s transformation to grid or shared computing with Boinc. Why did this seem to go by the wayside, or not maximized to become a secure cloud hosted by servers throughout the world. A charge back model could have been created to allow users to receive monetary value for their compute cycles. There are traditional answers which have halted it’s progress, however, there is a business model that allows anyone with a web host shared or leased, to turn a profit, such as Bloggers.

The world, from a personal computing standpoint, has progressed to laptops which have a highly utilized hibernate mode, which does not lend itself to leverage available compute cycles, because computers and the human processes that use computers are more efficient. Laptops are just as powerful as our ‘old’ servers, and so our servers for project use have been relegated solely to the world of academia.

Although, I find extremely interesting, there is an opportunity where grid computing can have life once again, through blog hosted servers. People who have blogs, which are hosted on servers other than WordPress.com or Google’s Blogger, have lower compute requirements for posting and serving up text and media then traditional apps hosted on web servers. Hosted bloggers should be able to identify their utilization of their server, and calculate the ability to ‘lend’ server time. In addition, a WordPress Plugin, for example, may be created as a User Interface, as well as a Boinc application interface. A web server version of Boinc and a deployment binary package would need to be created and deployed on your web server. At that point, WordPress APIs crafted as a plugin can be used to invoke the processing. Additional plugins or widgets for WordPress would allow for:

A widget on a blog side bar to display the results of a project your site ascribed to for grid computing, such as dynamic, refreshed charts and graphs

A plugin to embed short codes on blog pages to derive any information from the Boinc app client hosted on your Web Server.

A widget that allows YOUR customers to sign up, and short codes to display your charge back rates for allocation of your data streaming and CPU time.

Any project listed on the GridRepublic, or linked to by the Boinc Client from Berkeley is a potential client for your shared computing resource. In fact, anyone, such as a game developer looking to lease cloud computing and storage resources may be a client.

The Boinc client hosted in a web server may, if engineered to parallel process, integrate in a cooperative of web hosted blog sites, for faster computing, and higher revenue margins. This would be a phase two to the project, dividing up computing requirements to multiple servers. An open source project for affiliate networking, and even Google Wallet, or coincidentally, PayPal, an Amazon company, may be used collect and then allocate funds based on a charge back formula to ‘affiliate’ web hosted blogs. And this has never been tried before because? Comments welcome.

This is a natural progression for VMware, and as mentioned in the article, the biggest challenge for VMware, at least on the large scale implementions may be a tendency for some companies, especially for firms requiring high security such as financial institutions, regardless of rational behavior, may decide to go with a private cloud solution. All of the articles in the news also seem to weigh heavily on this decision, although this maybe a philosophical decision beyond the technical arguments.

An argument to use a public cloud might be a relatively no brainer for the small to mid-sized firms, who are prohibited by the cost of implementing a private cloud; however, the security, audit and compliance of handing over your cloud into a ‘public’ arena, may have benefits, such as external audit and control. Handing over control, may also be a major philosophical reason why people would in fact go with private clouds. Age old questions.

The other bit, I am hoping to see develop, as per the stack picture implies, using those VMs to implement Mobile OS VMs, which may solve the corporate and private segregation of data and applications, which was sited as an issue, and from a previous post, Solving the Corporate and Personal Data Dilemma for Mobile Devices. I’ve also mentioned this as a predicted trend, and it is possible, although unlikely, that a new Mobile OS player may emerge as a result of this unexplored opportunity. We may also see a down, but not out Mobile OS player take advantage of this opportunity, ahem, WebOS.or RIM, especially with the transparent lost ground this traditional corporate player once had, and may reclaim.

Google Takes on Amazon and Microsoft for Cloud Computing Services – NYTimes.com. This is the first bit of ‘news’ I’ve read all week with regard to Technology. The article holds no suprises, but a good read to the uninformed. I am unable to disagree, or apply additional insight to this article. Amazon has a strong lead, and as I mentioned last year, I saw Google getting into this space with it’s software and APIs available. It may have needed the manpower, and or infrastructure to build the back end to support the extensibility of the front end. Google also may offer new business models to complement it’s existing API offerings, as well as expand those APIs, and provide user friendly tools. I’d see, from this article, an Android API SDK extensibility to grab market share from Amazon. The article quotes that Android applications are using AWS, so if Google adds Android APIs to it’s SDK, it would give developers an easy, plug in option.

Today I talked with a few brilliant engineers about their latest, to be released Chipsets, and was I blown away by the brilliance of these product engineers and managers. Two chips I would like to briefly highlight today are the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, and the Nvidia Tegra 4 Chipset advancements.

Qualcomm

The Qualcomm Snapdragon Chipset is so off the charts amazing from a consumer standpoint, they had a room with a tablet plugged into a large high definition headset, and the room encapsulated a complete set of surround sound speakers, as well as each chair was equipped with a common headset. The tablet was plugged into the HD system through an HDMI cable, and that was it. I won’t bore you about 2K verses 4K High Definition upgrade standards, but what I can tell you was the video sequence they played on this Android tablet was of such high caliber quality and no lag whatsoever, and the sound was so superb, it would in fact give ANY of the movie theaters I have been to ever, a run for their money. I have been to quite a few movies in my lifetime.

The Nvidia team had us put on the headsets, which were your basic headsets, nothing special, but the same N channel surround sound that came out of each channel, e.g. center, front & side left, front & side right, and back channels was emulated through the headsets with the same superior sound quality, and power. The demonstrators had us remove our headsets as they were blasting sound through each channel, and we couldn’t believe the sound was not coming through the speakers, but was coming through the headsets themselves.

Qualcomm is looking at the second half of this year for general release to be pushed to their partners, and/or the consumers. That part was unclear, however, what was clear, was the amazing power you will have in your Android tablet coming soon.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800

Nvidia

I had the rare pleasure to speak with an amazing engineer at NVidia that took the time and patience to go through advancements of the Nvidia Tegra 4 Chipset. Instead of giving you the granular tech jargonese that we went through, I will sum it up in two ways. The Nvidia Tegra 3 Chipset already had an efficiency with a 5th core that primarily remained idle, and was used to gain battery life in mobile phones. What it did, and continues to do in the Tegra 4, at an idle period of the phone, instead of using these four massive processors to burn up the battery life, this 5th ‘light weight’, low power consumption core would handle the idle times, and give the four massive boys a rest. This extends the battery life significantly. Well, now the boys and girls at Nvidia said, after Tegra 3, hey, we have this 5th core, let’s allow ourselves to push the envelope slightly, not only use this core for battery life efficiency on your phone, but let’s let the mobile applications have access to this core so now you have 4 mean, powerful cores hard at work, and one slightly advanced core being used for both efficiency and graphical applications, like games. Brilliant.

Nvidia Tegra 4

Finally, Nvidia doesn’t stop there, it is now in the business development phase of bringing you cloud gaming, essentially Elastic Computing for Graphical Calculations in a cloud with an exponential set of these Chipsets, where you can subscribe to this gaming service, and all of the hard core tough calculations of rendering graphics at lighting speed is done in the cloud, and just the basic pixels get pushed to your phone, relatively a really light weight signature. Your phone or computer becomes a terminal emulator, which can focus on your inputs, instead of graphic rendering, and the cloud does all the hard work, again, brilliant, and the future of gaming. The engineer and I just looked at each other, and we knew, this was the pie in the sky for the gaming industry. Hold on to your hats, this is going to be a wild ride. Now, they are still in the stage where they must solidify the details with a cloud company that hosts these servers, and provides the gaming service, e.g. business development, but the technology has arrived. In addition, engineering and science packages like Mathematica may also use this type of Elastic Computing High Yield for massive calculations.

I am quite familiar with the Oracle and HP approaches of ‘owning the cloud stack’ and the Amazon Web Services approach which caters to all classes, cloud modules are interchangeable, and the arguments for both sides of the coin, one stop shop as a service, top tier clients verse the open APIs, partnering and interchangeability or plug in play cloud partner models. I challenge you to look beyond that and see a vast network of fiber, high speed computing available across the globe, from small and large companies over cloud solutions from infrastructure to data warehousing.

The question we should all be asking of small to mid size companies, who will be the solutions provider who pulls this all together? The solutions integrator, just like we saw in the 80s and early 90s when Banyan Vines, and Novell were sprouting, and we witnessed Microsoft out of the blue take hold of the Networking space. Are the Amazon Web Services the beginnings of an Open Sourced API Model? Will VMWare or Red Hat sprout up Cloud Farms? Will whomever owns the fiber lines, as in the Google Experiments in Kansas, will venture into the Cloud Business Model, provide Open Sourced APIs to small to mid sized businesses to be the small to mid sized solutions integrator of tomorrow?